I'm not sure why "Weelittledrummer" thinks that "English traditional music" should be supporting singer-songwriters, or why Bert thinks that EFDSS has something to do with it (as a matter of fact, that organisation has encouraged new writers in the idiom for a long time, though it isn't really part of their remit).

That said, it's notoriously difficult to get money out of the Arts Council for anything they think unfashionable. A favourite excuse until relatively recently was that folk music, being an amateur, grass-roots pursuit, didn't require subsidy; although that's no longer policy, there's a persisting attitude that an artform has to be the domain of "properly qualified" professionals (which of course is what the people who allocate funding consider themselves to be) before it is worthy of financial help.

An Arts Council official in my part of the world enquired, (not long ago, and in all seriousness), what the career development structure for Morris dancers was. It simply hadn't occurred to him that there might be legitimate art forms that are not "owned" by professionals.

To an extent, the narrow education that these people have received is to blame. They often seem to think that the mere mention of the word "English" implies some kind of racism. The truth is that, for political and historical reasons too complex to go into here, the cultural establishment in Britain has for centuries favoured imported art-forms at the expense of indigenous ones.

The fact that politicians -and many journalists- so often display a profound ignorance of (and contempt for) anything that does not conform to the bourgeois "art music" model, or, more recently, fashionable "world music" (which appears to include everything except us) is predictable, if depressing. It shows an unforgiveable intellectual laziness, and, not to put too fine a point on it, clear racism where the "folk" culture of one ethnic group is favoured above another.